3 - From Sketches to Papers: Gaskell’s Country Village

Summary

George Eliot was a toddler when Mary Russell Mitford first made her mark on the literary world, and she was just beginning to consider writing fiction when Mitford passed away in 1855. By contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell, who was ten years older than Eliot, encountered Mitford at the height of her popularity. The question is not, therefore, ‘Did Elizabeth Gaskell read Our Village’ but ‘When did she first encounter it?’ At the time that she set out to write the eight literary sketches for Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens that would later appear as Cranford (1853), Gaskell modelled not only her distinctive mode of publication on Mitford's work but also its content and form. She knew that Dickens would be particularly receptive to this approach. His own pieces that used walks as an armature formed the basis for the ‘Sketches of London’ series published in the Evening Chronicle between January and August 1835. They provided an urban counterpart to Mitford's country strolls. The last four in the series of fourteen appeared with the subtitle ‘Our Parish’, while the final sketch carried the phrase as its title. These irregularly published, but clearly related, sketches ‘form a kind of serial’ (Butt and Tillotson 2013: 41). As Mitford had done, Dickens subsequently collected these works, as well as others that had first appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and published them in bound form as Sketches by Boz.

When Dickens established Household Words he viewed the sketch form as a particularly appropriate genre of writing to fulfil his editorial aims. ‘To show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellent on the surface’, he writes in the first number, ‘there is Romance enough, if we will find it out’ (Dickens 1850: 2). As he put it to the biographer and critic John Forster in a letter dated 7 October 1849, Dickens sought submissions that were ‘as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the spirit of the people and the time’ (1981: 622). ‘Odd, unsubstantial, whimsical’ – these were the particular qualities of individual submissions that Dickens thought would be ‘just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for … [the reader’s] imagination, while it will represent common-sense and humanity’ (1981: 623).